Well there are but they're nuclear and they would pretty much wipe us all out.
The problem with ISIS, ISIL, Da'esh - whatever you call them - is that those guys are not quite everywhere but just about and they're expanding. This report from the UN Security Council has all the details.
Despite the efforts of the international community to counter ISIL through military, financial and border-security measures (which have recently inflicted substantial losses), ISIL continues to maintain its presence in Iraq and the Syrian Arab Republic. It is also expanding the scope of its operations to other regions. The terrorist attacks carried out in the final months of 2015 demonstrate that it is capable of committing attacks on civilian targets outside the territories under its control. The extent of its reach was notably demonstrated by the suicide bombings in Beirut on 12 November 2015, the coordinated attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015 and the attacks in Jakarta by an ISIL affiliate on 14 January 2016, which closely resembled the Paris attacks.
The recent expansion of the ISIL sphere of influence across West and North Africa, the Middle East and South and South-East Asia demonstrates the speed and scale at which the gravity of the threat has evolved in just 18 months. The complexity of the recent attacks and the level of planning, coordination and sophistication involved raise concerns about its future evolution. Moreover, other terrorist groups, including the Islamic Youth Shura Council and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant Libya Province (Derna) in Libya, the Mujahideen of Kairouan and Jund al-Khilafah in Tunisia, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Tehreek-e-Khilafat in Pakistan and Ansar al-Khilafah in the Philippines, are sufficiently attracted by its underlying ideology to pledge allegiance to its so-called caliphate and self-proclaimed caliph. ISIL has also benefited from the arrival of a steady stream of foreign terrorist fighters, who continue to leave their communities to replenish its ranks. The return of these fighters from the battlefields of Iraq and the Syrian Arab Republic and other conflict zones is a further major concern, as returnees can extend the presence of ISIL to their States of origin and use their skills and combat experience to recruit additional sympathizers, establish terrorist networks and commit terrorist acts.
Read the report. That will certainly help you understand how boneheaded the West has been with its aerial bombing campaign, obliterating random pickup trucks in the sands of Iraq and Syria while ISIS busies itself opening new franchises across the Muslim world. If anything the bombing campaign may be a dangerous distraction, leading us to believe we're achieving something while ISIS does an end run around us first throughout the Muslim nations and then in our cities.
They're smarter than we are and by a big margin. They're out to reach a critical mass organizationally, territorially and in sheer numbers while we respond with a war of empty gestures.
You can't bomb an idea.
ReplyDeleteI don't have to read this. I have known since before the Americans pulled out of Vietnam that one cannot bomb one's way into popularity with the peasant population. Worse, every bomb we drop creates more enemies. We should have know this from the Battle of Britain. All those German bombs strengthened the resolve of English people.
ReplyDeleteYes, American foreign policy is bone headed and has been ever since WWII. That's when Americans learned to love bombing. It's also when they learned to love an economy based on bombing. We always think of Americans are addicted to oil but the bigger addiction may be bombing with all the peripherals that go with it.
"Americans are wonderfully courteous to strangers, yet indiscriminately shoot kids in schools. They believe they are masters of the world, yet know nothing about what goes on outside their shores. They are people who believe the world stretches from California to Boston and everything outside is the bit they have to bomb to keep the price of oil down. Only one in five Americans hold a passport and the only foreign stories that make their news are floods, famine, and wars, because it makes them feel good to be an American. Feeling good to be American is what they live for. "
ReplyDeleteBrian Reade, London columnist
found at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/